Those Who Love Me Can Take The Train (Ceux Qui M'aiment Prendront Le Train)

Wednesday 16 August 2000 23:00 BST

The title of Patrice Chéreau's high-faluting Gallic soap opera is, apparently, the last words spoken by the painter Jean-Baptiste Emmerich, to whose funeral in Limoges the film's disparate protagonists must perforce travel. As a narrative device, it is as good a way as any of throwing together a bunch of serious misfits, failures, drug addicts, bisexuals, lovers and ex-lovers and allowing the melange to simmer. But it doesn't necessarily make for a good movie.

Chéreau is best known in Britain for La Reine Margot, though he is revered in France for his manifold talents in film, theatre and opera. Clearly, he is able to exercise amazing control over a large ensemble of actors (most notably Pascal Greggory, Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi, Charles Berling, Jean-Louis Trintignant and Vincent Perez), but the end result of this febrile, talkative, fizzing slice of life and death is rather like an elevated version of The Big Chill or Four Weddings and a Funeral - but without the Weddings.

The problem is that each character seems so monumentally self-absorbed that it is difficult to care a fig about their various emotional crises, even when they are rooted in experience that is not degrading or wilfully self-destructive. The performances are generally tremendous, with Trintignant appearing late in the day like a spectre at the feast (he is the twin brother of the dead painter) and a surprisingly sensitive reading of a trans-sexual from Perez, who appears to have stepped straight out of an Almodovar movie.

The sheer unlikeability of most of the characters militates against sympathy by the end, but it is certainly the busiest movie of the week.

Those Who Love Me Can Take The Train (Ceux Qui M'aiment Prendront Le Train) Cert: 15